Haiti
A dear friend mine recounts his experience in Haiti:
I just returned late last night after spending 10 days in Leogane, Haiti which is on the coast 30 km west of Port-au-Prince. I flew to Puerto Plata airport in the Dominican Republic on Saturday 16th. The airport at Port-au-Prince, Haiti was closed to all commercial traffic due to the volume of planes bringing aid from all over the world. So, the only way I could get to Haiti was to take a 10-12 hour bus trip overland across the island with journalists, relief workers, and regular people like me. I had volunteered to help the World Food Programme, and they accepted me because I spoke French and had teaching skills. The bus driver would not drive at night, so I spent Saturday 16th and Sunday 17th nights at a hotel in Puerto Plata. The bus was already fully reserved for Sunday 17th, so I got on the bus at dawn Monday 18th headed for Port-au-Prince, Haiti. There is nothing in this world that could have prepared me for what I was about to witness arriving 6 days after the earthquake struck.
As I entered Port-au-Prince late Monday afternoon 18th, I thought to myself this is what it must have been like in Hiroshima, Japan after we dropped the atomic bomb in World War II. The multiple floors of buildings were pancaked in on themselves crushing anyone that was inside when the quake struck. There is a cloud of concrete dust that just hangs in the hot, humid air reducing visibility and causing you to cough violently. There are tens of thousands of the dead still inside the rubble. I saw amidst the debris, gray swollen hands broken and twisted sticking out of a small air pocket in the concrete as if they were beckoning you to come save them from this hell. There are over 4,000 Americans still unaccounted for and presumed dead. The Haitian Ministry of Health expects the death toll to surpass 200,000 people. The truth is that no one will ever know the true death toll because there is no one taking photos of the dead to help relatives identify the bodies, most of the people have just piled their loved ones and those strangers pulled from the collapsed structures on the sides of the roads. People are just disappearing and will continue to do so. No one is counting the bodies- it is absolute chaos. The putrid stench of rotting flesh saturated the air everywhere. Swollen, stinking, corpses were thrown in piles along the sides of the streets. At a few places I saw dogs eating at the flesh of the dead. People were asked to leave the corpses outside of the cemeteries or churches for collection by the large dump trucks (like we take our garbage cans out to the curb for pick-up). People wandered the dirt streets aimlessly with a blank stare in their hollow dark brown eyes.
The injured are carried around on wooden doors acting as stretchers. No one would sleep inside any buildings that may still be standing because of all the aftershocks. I spent the night sleeping in the dirt with about 12 Haitian orphans and widowed mothers. They had made a makeshift tent out of bed sheets and wooden sticks. One woman there, who had been rescued from the rubble of her home 5 days after the quake, told me her story of how she and her 20 year old daughter were trapped by concrete on all sides the day of the quake 12th. Her daughter was covered up to the base of her neck. She would cry out to her mother that she was so thirsty, so her mother would urinate in her hand and give it to her daughter to drink. She did this for 5 days. The mother was rescued, but it was too late for her daughter- she died in a hole entombed by debris mere hours before the rescue teams arrived.
On Tuesday 19th I was able to catch a ride with Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) known to most as Doctors without Borders to the coastal town of Leogane. As we drove the coastal dirt road from Port-au-Prince the horrors continued to unfold before my eyes, one more gruesome then the last. Large empty dump trucks with dried blood streaking across the bed of the truck were seen all along the 30 km route. Front-loading bucket shovel heavy equipment were scooping up the piles of corpses and dumping them into the back of the dump truck. As we watched the twisted corpses, mangled limbs, and body parts, fell like a cascade into the dump truck. As we continued on we came to a village where the locals had doused the corpses lying on the road for 6 or 7 days with diesel fuel and then set them on fire. They told us that they could not stand the awful smell any longer. This scene was repeated several times across Haiti. The corpses that are being picked-up are taken to mass graves at different locations in Haiti. We saw a few mass graves which are large pits dug into the earth; sometimes these pits were not reserved for human remains. There was garbage, old bicycles, tires, etc. in the pits before the corpses were dumped in. We saw pits that were not even covered with dirt- no dignity for the dead whatsoever. After 1.5 hours ride we arrived in the city of Leogane. Population 134,000.
Upon arrival in Leogane on Tuesday 19th with Doctors without Borders we were absolutely shocked by what we saw there. I spent the remainder of my time in Haiti Tuesday 19th – Thursday 28th helping in Leogane. We were the first relief workers from anywhere to arrive in Leogane. The locals said that there had been no water, food, tents, medical supplies, doctors, or nurses since the quake on the 12th – one week ago! They said that all the aid was centered on Port-au-Prince, and that the outlying cities had been left to fend for themselves. They had not seen one person to help them. The distribution of materials which were abundant at the airport in Port-au-Prince was not reaching the outlying areas throughout Haiti. A local walked up to me and said with tears streaming down his dusty face there is no life here anymore…everyone is dead except for us.” The only building that was still standing was the hospital which ironically had closed two years ago because of no money to run it. Leogane was very close to the earthquake epicenter and was 90% destroyed. And I mean completely left in ruins- much worse than the devastation in Port-au-Prince.
The first rescue team to arrive was a British rescue team looking to employ search and rescue operations. They said we are too late to help here. They sent out a few dogs to sniff through the rubble, in frustration they said there is no one alive here in Leogane, we are better off back in Port-au-Prince. They then said good luck and goodbye. The school was in session in the afternoon when the quake hit at 4:53 pm local time. All 120 children (mostly orphans), and 3 teachers died and are still crushed in the rubble. Locals were digging in the concrete with their bare and bloodied hands hoping to recover the bodies of their loved ones. I happily joined them since I was searching for a loved one also. All that we found at the school was a blackboard that had written on it Aime tu dieu – Love your god. My brother taught the orphans who attended this school. He died doing what he loved. His corpse will be no doubt dumped into one of the many mass graves. It breaks my heart.
The next day Wednesday 20th, some relief workers from the World Food Programme arrived with some high protein biscuits but no water. Many people are suffering preventable infections meaning people are needlessly dying from open wounds that become infected, amputations due to the huge number of crushing injuries, no anti-biotic, or water. You can see on the injured the telltale yellow color on the bandages denoting that infection is there…and of course there is the smell. There are the injured that were not critical 3 days ago, are now in critical condition and most likely will die. There is a nursing school still standing that is now being staffed by nursing students who were propelled into the role of primary care physician- which they have no training for. I watched them use cardboard boxes as splints. So, I spent from Monday 18th – Thursday 28th trying my best to help those in a living hell. I spent 10 nights sleeping in the dirt with locals of all ages. There are tens of thousands of new orphans now, yet it was the young children who smiled and sang songs of hope.
I arrived home late last night exhausted emotionally and physically. I suppose that in the 11 days that I spent in Haiti I was surrounded by so much devastation and horror that I just kept busy and thought of all the good that I and thousands from all over the world were doing in Haiti as volunteers. Today, being back home and alone it all has hit me like an earthquake and Im still shaking.
L. N. M
January 16-28, 2010
